Audio Recordings Archive
Services
The Audio Recordings Archive (Suomen kielen nauhoitearkisto) is open to all scholars, students and members of the public. You are welcome to listen to our recordings in the archives, or order yourself a CD copy. We also lend recording equipment to scholars and students. The public online edition of our audio collection database: http://kaino.kotus.fi/naark (in Finnish).
The Collections
The Audio Recordings
Archive holds over 23,000 hours of recordings collected since 1959, providing
authentic samples of Finnish dialects, languages related to Finnish, and other
world languages. The collection additionally includes samples of Finnish
dialects spoken in
Digitisation of the audio bank was undertaken in 1999. Over half of its content has been digitised, totalling almost 15,000 hours of recordings (31.12.2012).
digitised (hours, mins.) | total (hours, mins.) | |
Finnish dialects | 10 893.49 | 15 655.09 |
Spoken Finnish | 1 325.17 | 1 687.33 |
Finnish cultural history | 1 734.19 | 3 354.24 |
Languages closely related to Finnish | 1 567.06 | 2 011.39 |
Languages remotely related to Finnish | 452.35 | 965.03 |
Other languages | 191.43 | 425.04 |
Total | 16 164.48 | 24 098.51 |
Content
The dialect
archive has been assembled over a period of decades, featuring dialect-speakers
conversing freely about topics ranging from birth and death to holidays and
everyday chores. The recordings yield valuable insights not only to linguists
and other scholars, but to anyone with an interest in Finnish history.
Most of the speakers were born between 1880 and 1920, and were aged 70–80 at
the time the recordings were made. All recordings were made in the
interviewees’ homes.
We are currently in the
process of compiling new audio material on contemporary spoken Finnish and
cultural history, including recordings of dissertations and presentations on
linguistics.
Additional resources
Key word lists are
available for the cultural history collection and for part of the dialect
archive. Type-written contents lists are available for the oldest dialect
recordings in the collection. These are currently being scanned to facilitate the
upkeep of the collection.
Transcripts exist for roughly
1,000 hours of our recordings. These are available for perusal on the premises.
Part of the transcript collection will be available in digital format in the
near future.
The recordings in the archive form the basis of a fifty-part series of publications entitled Suomen kielen näytteitä (‘Samples of spoken Finnish’). Many other dialect-related publications are also based on material in the audio archive.
Our former collection of 7,000
photographs of interviewees in their original settings has been entrusted to
the National Board of Antiquities’ Picture Archives.